He Died with a Felafel in His Hand Read online

  ‘I just can’t stand it,’ he said.

  * * *

  Des

  We had a cleaning lady. Gail. A western suburbs middle-aged cleaning lady with a shrieking voice. She’d start the morning with a bourbon and coke at our place. She’d come in and clean around us in our bedrooms, even when we had someone in there. The dishes piled up once when she was away. It got so bad in the end that we just dumped the whole thing in the bathtub and filled that up. But then we left it for a week. The water was just rancid. Lucky John got pissed one night, we heard all this splashing and crashing and clashing in the bathroom. We ran in there and he’d gotten naked, crawled in with the dishes and the toxic water.

  * * *

  With the house in such a state, the only replacement we could get was my friend Taylor, the taxi driver. He was coming out of a doomed relationship with a bikie chick and was knocking back two or three bottles of overproof rum every day. There were some dark forces at work inside him, manifesting themselves in the black Special Forces tee shirt, jungle camouflage pants and white running shoes which he never took off. We told people the white running shoes were the last vestiges of his human personality trying to hang on. When they were replaced by army boots it would be random sniper time.

  Taylor was usually out of his tree by mid-morning. By lunch time he’d be unbearable, crashing around the house, headbutting the fridge, roaring like a bull elk. He was very much the man in pain. I’d lock myself in my room, but he’d pound on the door, demanding to be let in for a drink. Most days, he’d give up after five minutes, but on one occasion he was determined enough to climb onto the roof and rappel down through my bedroom window with a bottle of Brandavino stuck in his web belt. He plopped on the floor, legs splayed out in front on him and started drinking and talking as though this was the most normal thing in the world. He later ambushed us on the way back from a paddlepop expedition. We’d gone looking to see if he wanted any, but couldn’t find him. When we came back he attacked us with a plastic pistol. Must have been hiding for three quarters of an hour. Told us if the pistol had been real we’d be dead.

  * * *

  Milo

  I remember that we all chose to ignore the life forms growing in the carpet, and to ignore the food and rotting matter in the fridge and the oven. We watched the knives and forks grow mould, and watched the garden grow up over the Hills Hoist. It was the maggots which finally got us to move. I don’t remember how long I spent on the cleaning frenzy. I didn’t know where to start. I thought I could start at the edges and chip away to the heart. Then I thought fuck it if I drive a stake through the heart it’ll die and wither. I alternated between the two, but nothing seemed to work, bagging and vacuuming methodically inwards, or just diving into the middle with a shovel and tossing it all out the windows. Days went by and days started and finished without any difference except that I was losing weight. We were doing it to get the bond back but in hindsight I should have just accepted the money wasn’t worth it and moved out.

  * * *

  Time to move on.

  Which meant cleaning up to reclaim the bond. We set aside two weeks for the job, but I got some temp work in a typing pool and Taylor just disappeared. Milo ended up doing most of the work. I’d come home at night and the poor bastard would have this drawn look around his eyes. He’d have been at it for eight hours straight, but you couldn’t see a damn bit of difference. He gave up after a week. I had to finish the job. I was on the case, when my friend Tim reappeared after a year in Asia. He’d been imprisoned in a Hong Kong asylum after a vodka binge. Woke up strapped to a bed in this enormous nut house surrounded by about seven thousand Chinese mental patients. The doctors had him full of lithium for the first week because he kept trying to escape. When he calmed down, they let him wander around, pretty much unsupervised. He got a phone call through to a friend in Canberra, also called Tim, who worked for Defence Intelligence. Tim Number Two flew straight up to Hong Kong and blustered his way into the hospital, putting the frighteners on the staff with his Australian security passes. He busted Tim out of there and they fled the colony with the law on their tails. The other Tim dropped my friend Tim off in Brisbane, and he made his way to my house at one in the morning.

  I was sitting up, pulling cones, watching some woeful sitcom on the teev when he came through the door. I didn’t recognise him straight off – he was cadaverous and looked authentically mad. But I eventually worked it out and told him to crash in my room. I looked after him for three days. When he wasn’t comatose on Valium, he was setting little fires in the kitchen. Eventually I waited until he passed out, ran around the house collecting my stuff, and split. I closed the door and left him in there on the carpet. He must have been okay because I moved in with him and some other guys a week later.

  * * *

  Voices of the Damned

  Evan

  ON THE INFAMOUS FRIDGE PISSING INCIDENT

  After the frypan, the fridge is the greatest source of angst and disruption in any share house. Everybody complains but nobody is willing to do the minimum necessary to stop it from toxing out.

  My friend Evan tells me he had a flatmate who bought a whole bunch of those magnetic fridge letters for leaving notes to the house. Stuff like ‘Hey guys. Let’s clean up’. But the house just rearranged them to say things like ‘Say no to anal flatmates.’

  God knows what sort of message Evan could have spelled out with the magnetic fridge letters if the following incident had taken place in that house.

  EVAN LIVES BY HIMSELF NOWADAYS.

  * * *

  I awoke fully clothed on the brown couch in our lounge room with only hazy memories of the night before. I’d been out drinking, really heavy drinking – two fisted, round-the-clock, saturation-point binge-drinking – and I had the uncomfortable feeling that I’d pissed in the fridge on coming home. I had no conscious memory of having done it, but this little voice in the back of my mind kept whispering. ‘You know you pissed in the fridge don’t you?”

  I stumbled out to the kitchen but I couldn’t see any evidence, only the remains of some kippers plastered on the walls.

  The issue rested until a few days later when Fran, my housemate, came into my room with a disturbed look on her face.

  ’Hey, did you know the fridge is having some defrosting trouble?’ she asked.

  ‘Really?’ I said, idly turning the pages of the book I was reading.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s got two inches of water in the veggie tray.’

  Coffee sprayed from my mouth.

  ‘Aaahh, I'd better have a look at that,’ I said, and followed her to the kitchen. I pottered around the fridge while she sliced the veggies she’d taken out of the crisper.

  My mind was racing.

  ‘Probably the thermostat or something - seems to be all right now.’ I said. I was stalling for time. I needed to instigate a full forensic search of the driptray without arousing suspicion. Trouble was, she was already hunkered down at the chopping board, slicing and dicing the possibly contaminated carrots and brussel sprouts.

  ‘Uhm, Fran, you're not planning to eat those veggies are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she replied. ‘What else would I do with them?’

  ‘Well I really don’t think you ought to,’ I said, desperately casting about for some excuse, some gambit to send her out of the room for a few minutes while I cleaned up in her absence.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  ‘Well the fridge water, it’s not healthy,’ I said.

  She wanted to know what was wrong with it. I could see there was nothing for it but to come clean.

  ‘It's like this,’ I said. ‘There's been a little accident. Adrian got really pissed and ... ahm anyway, he told me he thinks he might have urinated in the fridge ...’

  ‘What!!!’

  ‘Exactly, terrible accident, but the thing is, I think he's very embarrassed about it so I wouldn’t mention it, OK?’I blathered and improvised but it didn’
t really seem as if it was going to be OK. I bolted when Fran stormed into Adrian’s room and started yelling at him.

  It was horrible.

  I sent them my rent and two weeks notice the next day and never went back.

  4 THE SMALL WORLD EXPERIENCE

  The thing about Brisbane is that everyone knows you or knows about you. In small world theory, there’s only six points of separation between any two individuals, but you can trim down the numbers in Brisbane. Everyone’s stories intersect, crossing over and through each other like sticky strands of destiny and DNA. I lived with a dozen people in one house, and none of them were formally interviewed before they moved in. That’s not unusual. You tend to rent whole houses with friends and the friends of friends in Brisbane. Even moving into a room in an existing household is mostly a matter of trading history and establishing common reference points. ‘Oh right. You know Chris. He used to live with my last flatmate’s girlfriend and her cousin.’ Then Chris, the girlfriend and her cousin turn up to help you move your furniture in, and you all sit on the front verandah drinking tea, watching the storms roll in and pushing back the envelope of the extended family that is Brisbane.

  * * *

  Hack

  My friend Claudia and this other girl wanted to get a guy in to their house to do the guy stuff. Change the light bulbs, beat up the burglars and so on. They took this guy after interviewing about fifteen others. He was cool. Been there a week, the guy stuff’s getting done, they’re all getting along. They’re sitting in the lounge room one night with the dog, watching a movie. Half way through this guy reaches over and starts wanking off the dog. Claudia freaked and said, ‘What are you doing? That’s disgusting! Stop it right now!’ He turned to her and looked at her really carefully and said, ‘Just helping out a mate.’

  * * *

  We even had a generational thing going at Duke Street, one of the most frightening houses I have ever lived in. My uncle Robbie, a former hippy, turns up with a parental relief parcel one day and tells me he lived in the exact same house twenty years ago as a professional desperado in the early 1970s.

  The place was in better condition in those days. The owners rented out single rooms rather than the whole house. Robbie and three friends went along thinking they were getting the whole deal, but there were two guys in the front room who came with the house, these two fugitives from Western Australia. Nobody knew who they were. The hippies said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ and the guys said, ‘We live here.’ The landlord had rented the room to a couple of outlaws. One was Ron and the other was Max. Max was wanted in Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria. Ron was running from Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Tasmania. They’d made their way to Brisbane, changing their last names as they went but sticking with their christian names to avoid confusion. They were okay. Some Orange People moved into the neighbourhood and someone stupidly invited one of them around for a feed. This Orange person turned up with another five or six Orange people, and they just wouldn’t leave. Set up camp in the living room. Started eyeing off the chicks. It looked ugly for a while, until Ron and Max returned from some job they’d pulled, beat the shit out of the Orange People and threw them out into the street.

  Duke Street’s standards had slipped in the intervening years. There were about ten of us living there. Another house full of fuck-offs and misfits and perennial students. We had neighbours on all sides. Complaining neighbours. They hassled us constantly. So constantly in fact that we kept a Complaint Scoreboard on the fridge door. When we got to ten complaints, we’d have a party. You’d think they’d learn, but they never did. The morning after the party, they’d give us a head start on the next one with a fresh round of complaints. We were all living off welfare at this time, and the DSS had the place on the area map, flagged with a skull and crossbones. Dole fascists regularly descended upon the place in human waves. They’d given up trying to pick us off individually –the house was so disorganised that even at six in the morning their chances of catching the right person at home were less than zero. So they sent a couple of blanket sweeps through the place, kicked down the door at five in the morning, sprayed capsicum gas in our eyes and beat us on the soles of our feet with big sticks, said we were all being reviewed and the whole house would have to attend a compulsory seminar. It was a horrible joke. A fat Christian told us to keep our spirits up, showed us a motivational video and made us tell each other we were valuable human beings. Magyver got caught trying to make off with the powdered coffee.

  * * *

  Susan

  I once sublet my room to an old woman for three months. When I got back from travelling my flatmates told me she belonged to some weird religious cult. She used to wander around the house at night, holding candles, waiting for fellow cult members to come and stare in through the windows.

  * * *

  Magyver had the room next to me. He only ever wore blue nylon Dunlop overalls and although he was a qualified psychotherapist, he worked on a mushroom farm and seemed at home there. He was only employed part-time, but he enjoyed shovelling shit and carting trays of mushrooms about so much that he spent all of his spare time out there too. Really got into it. Last I heard, he’d gone to South America, looking for the Surinam toad, which someone told him has a small concave depression in its back – ‘I’m telling you, man. It’s a freak show!’ – and while he was over there checking it out he met some Chilean girl in a brothel. She wasn’t a hooker – just had a room on the top floor. Magyver shacked up with her in this cat house. He sent back one postcard, said she was the most fantastic woman he’d ever known. When his visa ran out, he gave her three thousand dollars to arrange a passage back to Australia, but the next thing he knew, she had a job with the World Bank. That was the last he ever heard of her.

  * * *

  Bob

  These girls I knew, lived just around the corner, got this guy in. He’d been there for three or four days, everything was fine. But they came home one night and found him on the couch with all the lights on, completely naked, sucking on their panties. He booked himself into the loony bin the next day.

  * * *

  Neal the albino moontanner had the master bedroom in the house. You’d come home at one or two in the morning and he’d be in his underpants, stretched out on the banana lounge in the front yard, staring up at the heavens.

  ‘What’s happening Neal?’

  ‘Moontanning, man.’

  One night he came in all shaken up. He’d been checking out the girls across the road from us, whom he was kind of keen on. Not looking eager, just kicking back on the banana lounge. They were cute, in a cashmere sweater kind of way, and Neal was certain that if they could just be introduced to sex by an albino moontanner, they’d never look back. Sadly one of the girls spilled out of a cab, drunk, with a flat-headed rugby type who fucked her like a dog on the front lawn in the moonlight. Took a few cones before Neal could get over that one.

  After catching those moonrays, Neal liked sleeping more than anything else. Had this theory about it. The hassle avoidance theory of sleep – ‘I’d sleep twenty hours to avoid a hassle,’ he’d say. He had a rumpled street-dwelling demeanour and his room looked like the inside of a big St. Vinnies clothing bin. There was no mattress to speak of, just enough rags and old clothes to pile up and crawl under so that it didn’t matter. His best friend was Howie, a mad red-headed bastard who became a virtual flatmate by reason of his never leaving the house for more than a few hours at a time. When he did leave, it was only to pick up one of the rusting, arthritic old British motorcycles he and Neal used to strip down in the spare living room, the one in which we normally played basketball. They’d only ever get half way through the job, and then the bike would be gone, replaced by another in even worse condition.

  Neal and Howie were guys with way too much time on their hands. I was back doing Law by this time, but I gave up studying at the house because of the noise. Noise from the indoor golf driving range, noise from
the motorbike corridor time trials, noise from the chainsaw Howie attached to his arm while they role-played Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. He loved strapping on that big Makita and charging around, looking for Undead zombies to chop up. His eyes were strangely vacant as he laughed and smote the fibro walls, tearing chunks out of them in roaring clouds of asbestos dust. At least with the chainsaw you’d hear him coming. Golf practice was way past frightening. Neal and Howie didn’t fuck around with office Putt Putt. They teed up at the end of the hall and smashed these drives away with full blooded swings of their woods and five irons. The walls left standing after the chainsaw massacre were pock marked by the sort of holes that machine guns leave in the Bugs Bunny cartoons.